Absolutely buzzing over this new video of a rarely seen giant squid

Fundamental issue here is that university work can't just be about having opinions. We're either assessing on the basis of standards of evidence and argumentation or we're (in this guy's reactionary framing) handing out participation trophies...

@npr it’s not a principle. It is a constitutional guarantee.

Not me sitting through my required yearly bloodborne pathogens lab training where they discuss the risks of exposure to Hep B on the same day that RFK Jr. officially removes the recommendation for Hep B vaccination for newborns. We are living through the most stupid and dangerous timeline

Students! Don't miss the chance to submit your essay for the William S. Pollitzer Student Travel Award! The deadline is TOMORROW (Dec 5) at 11:59pm Pacific Standard Time.

Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration agents. They’ve had their necks kneeled on. They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear. At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them.

Rep. Ilhan Omar: "I hope he gets the help he needs. It sounds like he's trying to deflect from the failures that he's had as president ... he's fought to be the head of the pedophile protection party."

“While administrators cut ribbons on their AI initiative, they were also cutting faculty positions, entire academic programs, and student services.”

I'm really pleased that my first coauthored article of 2026 is out. With some amazing folks @marckissel.bsky.social @anthrofuentes.bsky.social we think through a synthesis of behavioral ecology, emotional cognition, and archaeology. www.johnhawks.net/p/bringing-e...

Students: the deadline for #AABA2026 travel awards is this week!

Just out "Social and emotional cognition in Pleistocene hominin evolution: The role of biocultural processes" with @johnhawks.net @marckissel.bsky.social Penny Spikins, Jennifer French and me. Open access in Journal of Archaeological Science... www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Big implications of a small hip fossil lawnchairanthropology.com/2025/11/30/h...

People catastrophizing about a precedent where no one can mark anything down anymore for being wrong when the real precedent is trans people not being able to do literally any job without an army of bigots launching a harassment campaign against their employer.

Look around. The case for more, not less, liberal arts education - actual, real education in reading, writing, thinking, arguing, analyzing, & synthesizing by doing the actual hard work for which there is no substitute - is stronger than it’s ever been at any point in human history.

to be *really* clear: this is LLM related research but if you read it what they are very much *not* doing is just pointing a model at it and asking "what do you think the whales are saying"

Our next video in the series "Preserving knowledge of endemic species in #Madagascar through storytelling" features #Ranomafana wildlife expert RAKOTOVAO Remi, who has studied #lemurs since 1994! He shares his experiences AND some bird calls! You can view Remi’s video here: lnkd.in/gH9xpqBi

The hip new Australopithecus deyiremeda fossils highlight the need for more studies of skeletal growth and development lawnchairanthropology.com/2025/11/30/h...

Indeed. The "Western Civilization" they like is Nero, Columbus, and Hitler at the apex of their power. They hate all the rest of it, especially the art, philosophy, and democracy. Hence stuff like their confusion and outrage when the Olympic ceremonies included the Olympian God of Festivals.

it's hard to get your mind around how irredeemably broken this country has become. no one in charge at this time seems to understand even the basics of our system of government as written or our stated set of values as a secular society

Kudos to Rebecca for leading this charge! Lynn's data is an embarrassment to the scientific enterprise. The skull measurers on Twitter are having a predictable response with the repeated claim that "other data replicate" Lynn's results. Easy to see that's not true for the 2002, 2012, or "new" set

Happy Thanksgibbon everyone!

I taught (and co-taught) a course on human population genetics from 2000-2024. Having retired, I'm now making all the course materials public: github.com/alanrogers/p... #popgen #evbio

Awesome new hominin fossils from Ethiopia 3.5 million years ago, by Yohannes Haile-Selassie & co www.nature.com/articles/s41... The new juvenile hip bone 😍 (left in image) has a long ischium like other juvenile Australopithecus (center) and unlike later humans like Homo naledi (right)

Australopithecus deyiremeda 🤝 Burtele foot www.sciencenews.org/article/foot... 🏺🧪

Peter Thiel says he read Rene Girard but I don't think he gets it: mimesis is when you keep obsessing about the Antichrist that you get entangled with it, you mimic it, start to transform into it

Coming together to eat the food we share has been part of humanity from the very beginning. I wrote this post after a Thanksgiving week lecture on evidence for Neanderthals and other ancient people making prepared mixtures of grains, lentils, and other foods. www.johnhawks.net/p/a-neandert...

This is a remarkable open access resource for genomic work on living great apes. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I think @brendannyhan.bsky.social is exactly right in this piece, but I’d go one step further here. Elites very explicitly told young people to sit down and shut up. Society punished them for standing up for their beliefs, and targeted and vilified the organizers. Now we need need them.

I have a story today about interoception--a kind of sixth sense that delivers information from within our bodies to our brains. nyti.ms/4rfTDtn

Attn all human MRI/fMRI folks! The Dept of Psychology at Northeastern University is hiring a new Director of the NU Biomedical Imaging Center at the level of Associate or Full Professor. Bonus: you'll have the best Chair EVER 😉 Full ad here: northeastern.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/careers/job/...

The marvelous Lucy was discovered #OnThisDay in 1974 in Ethiopia. At more than 3 million years old, she was the oldest, most complete ancestor found to date. 🏺 📸Don Johanson & Maurice Taieb piecing the fossils together

Difficult to overstate how profound a failure DOGE was. Spending in FY2025 was not only than in FY2024 – but higher than it was projected to be when Trump first took office.* The little bit of spending DOGE cut has already killed hundreds of thousands and will eventually lead to millions of deaths.

During #AAA2025 seems like a good time to re-up this. LMK if you have any questions about UGA or life in Athens!

Are you local to the DC area and want to be a public engagement volunteer with us in the Hall of Human Origins? Apply now! naturalhistory.si.edu/join-us/volu...

‼️📢 Neandertal as prey‼️ We demonstrated selective cannibalism behavior at the end of the Middle Palaeolithic in Northern Europe #Neandertal #Prehistory #Cannibalism #MiddlePaleolithic #Goyet

It’s widely known (and, I think, pretty uncontroversial) that learning requires effort — specifically, if you don’t have to work at getting the knowledge, it won’t stick. Even if an LLM could be trusted to give you correct information 100% of the time, it would be an inferior method of learning it.

🧪🏺🦣 Hugely important new data here, I need time to digest it (🙃), but this kind of detailed contextual work is EXACTLY what we need to avoid stereotypes that #Neanderthal body processing & cannibalism were simply "brutal massacres"

Yes, you CAN go back in time! This StoryMap allows readers to experience several hundred million years of Earth history in just minutes with a scroll-driven animation. Happy GIS Day too! ow.ly/ZjFV50XsVbc Want to know how the team did it? ow.ly/gC3k50XsVQY ⚒️ 🧪 #gischat #geogsky #geogchat 🌎 🌍 🌏

Not all sexual swellings signal fertility. Some signal strategy. In our new Current Biology paper, we show how gelada females “fake it” during male takeovers—and why it works. authors.elsevier.com/a/1m7%7E93QW...

1,019 glaciers have disappeared since 1973 in Switzerland! ✝️ 1st nationwide assessment of vanished glaciers: >40% of the glaciers inventoried in 1973 ~13% (47±3 km²) of total glacier area loss! 🧊🔥 But, as it is based on the latest inventory (from 2016), the actual figures are far much higher! 📈 😰

Ancient tooth proteins reveal the biological sex and genetic diversity of Paranthropus robustus. Led by Dr. Palesa Madupe of the University of Copenhagen and UCT’s HERI, this study provides the oldest human genetic data from Africa. 🔗 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Gibbons Are Great reason one million: absolutely small apes with relatively big brains

So Harvard is keeping this guy, but Claudine Gay had to step down over ginned up plagiarism accusations and bad-faith accusations of anti-Semitism. Got it.

📆 Reminder: The deadline for Pollitzer Student Travel Awards to attend #AABA2026 in Denver is December 5. Be sure to submit your application! bioanth.org/about/willia...

I'm giving a talk at my work this week that is being broadcast online via Zoom! Maybe you're interested in watching? "Archaeology of Ableism and Ableism in Archaeology: Building a More Rigorous Archaeology through Disability Studies" Wednesday, November 19, 12-1pm Pacific #academicsky 🏺♿

I talked a bit with Jason about Grokipedia and it is, without exaggeration, like if you trained an LLM solely on white supremacist blogs and had it try to write Wikipedia entries. Some of the most insane stuff I’ve seen on the internet

Writing more about Homo erectus this week, podcast interview set up for Monday, giving a conference presentation on the topic Thursday. The topic is really heating up—prompted by the reconsideration of many of the early fossils from mainland Asia. www.johnhawks.net/p/the-proble...

Walrus popping out of the water to say good evening

For #FossilFriday & in honor of @alinemghilardi.bsky.social & colleagues' fantastic discovery of a new Cretaceous pterosaur in Brazil in a dinosaur regurgitalite ("fossil vomit"), here's a diagram I made for my book 'Dinosaurs Without Bones' (2014) showing the physics of a puking brachiosaur. 🧪🦕🤮🪨

In the immortal words of Sir Mix-a-Lot: "And ugh, double-up, ugh, ugh". 2 doggy papers are so much better than 1. Both studies a testament to slow science & international collaboration between brilliant people. What it's all about. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...